A post from Id Software
Robert A. Jung
in rgv.atari who don't get that group would be interested in reading it.
--R.J.
B-)
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Send whatevers to rj...@netcom.com | If it has pixels, I'm for it.
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"You weren't chosen because you are the best pilot in the Air Force. You were
chosen because you are the class clown and frankly, you're expendable."
In article <940916120...@idcube.idsoftware.com jo...@idcube.idsoftware.com (John Carmack) writes:
Wow, there is a lot of rabid advocacy in this group... I hope this
isn't a really bad idea to poke my head in here. Please, please,
please do not send me mail arguing something I say here.
DOOM is allllmost done. Music and modem code is about all that's
left. Its good.
To address the two main topics of discussion:
Is the Jaguar doomed?:
This christmas will tell. If atari sells close to their estimates,
they will be a serious market target for next year.
I really don't think 3DO will bury the jag. Its too expensive, and
it doesn't have a technical edge to make up for it.
The sega 32x is a nice machine, and they are shipping good numbers
for christmas. It is less powerfull than the jaguar is when really
pushed, but it is easier to get things going at a decent speed.
The sony psx and the sega saturn will both cost $100 to $200 more
than the jaguar (CD machines). They are both more powerfull (to a
greater or lesser degree), but neither one will have a wealth of
games when they debut.
The ultra-64 is over a year away. It will probably be damn good, but
a year is a long time.
3D engines:
For 24 bit parallax scrolling graphics, the jag will outperform a
pentium, but it is only about as powerful as a low end 486 for
texture mapped games. Its not really an apples to apples comparison
because of the parallel nature of the jag, but that is a fair
aproximation.
The jaguar CANNOT make a fully textured, full screen, full resolution
game that runs at 30 fps. The bus will simply not take that many
accesses. The 64 bit bus will let you do really fast shaded
polygons, but texture mapping is done a single pixel at a time.
DOOM had to be significantly reworked to get good performance, but it
wasn't designed from the ground up to take advantage of the Jaguar.
If I was designing a game from scratch for the Jag (I'm not), I would
target 20 fps with a 256*180 view window in 16 bit color as a
reachable goal. Doom runs 15 fps at 160*180 because the basic design
is non-optimal for the jag's characteristics. I wrote it for the pc.
There are a lot of tradeoffs you can choose. AVP made very different
choices than I did. They have a lot more pixels on the screen, but
it runs slower (about 12 fps) and the engine is a lot more limited.
The engine is essentially the level of Shadowcaster on the pc (90
degree walls, transparent segments, floor/ceiling texture mapping,
strictly diminishing lighting and a rear clipping plane). They chose
to use higher resolution bitmaps, so they have less variety.
John Carmack
Id Software